Google Waves Goodbye To Wave

It was 30 months ago that Google unveiled Wave, its real-time messaging online collaboration tool, claiming that it would be what email
would "look like if it were invented today."

However a little over a year later, in August 2010, Google
admitted that Wave was not making an impression and it would stop all
development of the service. Today, the company has put the final nail in Wave’s
coffin outlining the dates the service will finally come to an end.

Google Wave will become read-only on 31 January, meaning you
won’t be able to create new waves any more. Three months later, on 30 April, the
service will be turned off completely. You’ll be able to continue exporting
individual waves using the existing PDF export feature until the Google Wave
service is turned off.

Google has also pointed current Wave users in the direction of
similar open-source projects, such as Apache Wave and Walkaround.

Google’s latest so-called spring clean will see six other
services being binned as part of the company’s attempt to do away with some of
the ideas which haven’t caught the public’s imagination.

"We're in the process of shutting a number of products which haven't
had the impact we'd hoped for, integrating others as features into our broader
product efforts, and ending several which have shown us a different path
forward," said Urs Holzle, Google's vice president of operations.
"Overall, our aim is to build a simpler, more intuitive, truly beautiful
Google user experience."

The other projects getting the boot are:

Google Bookmarks List - a service which allowed users to
share bookmarks with friends

Google Friends Connect - allowed webmasters to add social
features to their sites by embedding a snippet of code